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Big data is disrupting all that we do. With a scalable analytics platform, police agencies can stay one step ahead of crime.

Overview

For policing and law enforcement agencies, there are compelling reasons why they must rapidly manage and interpret increasing volumes of data more effectively. Officers need accurate and timely information to enable real-time decision making in the field. Police agencies must keep track of citizen feedback to help build trust and confidence. And officers need to be deployed proactively to help prevent and detect crime and make the most of critical resources.

Data is the lifeblood of good policing, but with disparate systems and poorly integrated sources, intelligence is being hidden, or worse, lost. Innovative policing and law enforcement agencies that use a technology-agnostic, scalable analytics platform can combine old and new data to not only tackle crime today, but also anticipate and prevent crime tomorrow. Supported by such a platform, they can keep pace with increasing volumes of data, adapt to the changing nature of digital technologies, be flexible for the future and stay one step ahead of crime.

How is data analytics transforming policing?Find out how police and law enforcement agencies who attended the 2016 Public Safety Summit at Harvard University are facing the challenges around effective use of data—and how they are setting themselves up for the future with data analytics.

Background

For data to be converted to actionable insights, police and law enforcement agencies must overcome the following data challenges:

Fragmented data: Gaining a clear picture of a situation requires a largely manual time-consuming and labor-intensive process across multiple systems.

Auditable data: Without a clear and established audit trail, police forces are unable to track whether an officer followed the right protocols when making key decisions.

Accurate data: If officers do not have confidence in the data, they will not use it.

Timely data: Even good data is of little use if it is not timely—and easy to interpret for officers on the front line.

Key Findings

In today’s digital world, data is multi-dimensional and affects all aspects of public safety. Challenges include:

Police and law enforcement agencies need to collaborate and share data with other agencies while managing their resources more effectively.

Officers need to easily integrate and analyse all types of data: text, images, videos, audio, sensors and other unstructured data and combine their own with data gathered from both open and partner sources.

Citizens want to engage with the police and they expect the police to be armed with the right knowledge to tackle crime.

An analytics platform can draw on the right information in real time, enhancing the management of incidents and improving officer traceability and safety. Such a platform brings together information sources to provide frontline officers with a single view of the truth and offers the intelligence, awareness and support to resolve incidents.

Analysis

An organisation-wide analytics platform can combine, manage and interpret data search, sensors, video and real-time visualisation to improve officers’ understanding and management of their operational environment. A single analytics platform:

Informs the command center: for example, by collecting and interpreting information that supports decision making at every level, faster and more easily.

Better serves citizens: for example, by sending alerts that link with wearables to mitigate risk and provide support for frontline officers at the scene of a crime.

Recommendations

Using an analytics platform approach, police forces can run one integrated solution to consolidate, analyse and understand all their data, from any source, format or location with extreme speed, security and scale, using larger data sets than in the past, to help police agencies to:

Intervene early to identify officer activity outside of peer group norms and build trust and confidence in the police department. Police leaders can proactively address potential issues, inside and outside the force, before they become actual problems.

Enable officers to help predict crime patterns and better identify the locations where precious resources are most needed using new technologies.

Protect citizens by better understanding potential crime hotspots and identifying vulnerable people to prevent them from being drawn into criminality.

Accenture Insights Platform

The Accenture Insights Platform can transform the way public safety agencies work and share information for the benefit of command control, officers and citizens.

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